Yesterday, Corbyn wrote “We as a labour
movement have to be strong enough to stand up and ensure that we have a system
that prevents anyone falling into destitution, supports those going through
mental health crises and ends the internal market and privatisation of our
health service."

Later
today, parliament will debate a
vote of no confidence in health secretary Jeremy Hunt, Health
Secretary, after two petitions calling for such a debate attracted over 300,000
signatures - though the Government has relegated it
down from the main chamber of the House of Commons, to the significantly more
low-key Westminster Hall venue. Doctors have been asked to ensure their MP
attends this debate and to ensure the focus is on Hunt and his record.

NHS campaigners
will be out in force to show the Government the depth of feeling for the NHS
and against Conservative ideological direction at the Tory Party conference in Manchester on 3-7
October.

The greater openness
of political debate, first in the Scottish independence referendum and now in
the Labour Party leadership election, means that many more will be ready to get
involved. And we must be ready to respond to every anti-NHS argument.

The ideological
untruths and practical assaults on the NHS and public sector that we saw under
the coalition government are being ramped up under the new Tory government.

If a public service
is starved of essential finance for long enough it will start to fail – and the
NHS is no exception. Just earlier this month, GPs in Worcestershire were told not to
refer patients to local NHS hospitals for three months so that they could clear
a backlog – and encouraged to pay private hospitals to take patients in the meantime.

The NHS is ‘broken’,
wrote James Bartholomew in the Telegraph electing to place the NHS bottom of the pile of European health
systems. He concludes that the 'failed' NHS must be replaced by a compulsory
insurance system, such as that of Switzerland.

In the UK of
course, there is a compulsory contribution to the NHS from public taxation made
in the UK. The great difference is that the UK system is not run for profit and
is free at the point of need.

But Bartholomew’s
argument is a purely ideological one. Like the Government, he wants us to
equate publicly funded health systems with failure.

His 2004 book The Welfare State We’re In was praised
by Thatcher’s guru, Milton Friedman, as “a devastating critique of the welfare
state”. Duringthe 2010 pre-election period, Bartholomew advocated the
abolition of the NHS on Radio 4.

Our NHS has been amazingly
effective despite ongoing underfunding compared to other advanced national
health systems. Just why is it that the
NHS has lower number of doctors and acute hospital beds
per 1000 population and second lowest number of MRI scanners per million
compared to other advanced European health systems? It is a failure of funding
rather than a failure of the NHS. It receives less funding than the OECD average and less than the European
comparators.

Efforts to
privatise whole swathes of health services have failed to deliver more effective
care and are proving more costly. We now face a national health service
increasingly without national coordination of
standards, with shrinking resources and accelerating fragmentation.
This will devastate patient care pathways which rely on many services cooperating
together (including social care).

We must get back the
NHS. In the example of New Zealand we can see the immediate benefits if we succeed. New Zealand privatised
their health service in 1993. Perverse incentives dominated and costs
escalated. The new 1999 government looked this failure in the eye. They made a
political decision to act on the evidence and renationalised their health
service in 2000 with clear benefits. Following the calamitous Christchurch earthquake
of 2010, public conclusions were that the privatised and fragmented health
service would not have been able to respond to such magnificent effect as New
Zealand's reinstated NHS.

There is one category where the UK comes out close to bottom in
international comparisons like the Commonwealth Fund (though still above the USA).

It’s ‘healthy lives’, a category which reflects more specifically health
inequality: the effects of poverty, education and societal attitudes to
promoting early child development (see the Marmot Review).

The greatest single determinant of
health outcomes is of course poverty. The impoverishment of the British people
through austerity, unemployment, low wages and zero hour contracts, the mental
and physical stress that places on us, coupled with the assault on the funding
of the NHS and escalating privatisation, means that the battle to save our NHS
is more important than ever.

With additional reporting by Caroline Molloy.

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